Nick answers questions about trends, automated features such as smart bidding and dynamic ads, and the lifetime value of a customer. He gets into profitability, saying that rather than obsessing over CPA or ROAS, advertisers should look at their profit. I agree with that advice.

He also says, “Buy all the relevant keywords.” Lawson asks, “All of them?” Nick says, “There’s no need to carefully select our keywords anymore. The machine will automatically figure out which of those work for us.”

That got my attention. And I totally disagree with him.

At first glance, the article reads as helpful and forward-looking. We are all going to need automation if we are going to scale our campaigns and keep up with the competition. But when you read deeper into the recommendations in the article, most of them are basically saying “Trust us. We’re Google.”

Do you notice a pattern here? Every single recommendation in the article is to just use all of Google’s tools to optimize your campaigns.

Trust us. We’re Google.

I’m not saying that no one should use any of the tools Nick mentioned. In the right circumstances, each of these options makes sense. But I would not use all of them, all the time. I never use optimized ad rotation. I prefer to use third party bid automation tools rather than Google’s bid rules. And dynamic ads and campaigns are a nightmare for B2B advertisers.

I’ve never been a fan of handing Google the keys to your marketing campaign success. I’ve seen time and again where using Target CPA bidding can throttle the volume of your campaign, killing revenue and profit. I would never simply bid on every keyword possible. That is a worst practice, bordering on irresponsible in my opinion.

But hey, trust us. We’re Google.

Nowhere is Google’s arrogance more apparent than with the new Adwords UI. This week’s PPC Chat on Twitter was all about digging in to the new UI. I had a client meeting and had to miss most of the chat, but you can find it on the #ppcchat hashtag. While participants praised a few elements in the new UI, the overwhelming sentiment was that it’s much harder to use, missing key features, and slows down workflows.

Take the Extensions section, for example. Users find the labels confusing and meaningless.

That’s just one example of the many, many issues people have with the new UI. When host Kirk Williams asked for a list of suggestions for Adwords, he got a ton of them:

Exactly. GA has moved things around in the past. When the most recent version rolled out, the transition was seamless. It was easy to find what you were looking for. Adwords supposedly crafted the new Adwords UI to act more like GA – but it misses the mark. Nothing is where you expect it to be. Key features are missing or hidden. Custom columns are gone. And there’s horizontal scrolling.

It does not appear that Adwords designed the new UI with input from actual users. But why would they? They think it’s better, so it must be. Trust us, we’re Google.

Do you agree? Or should I put away my cane and stop telling people to get off my lawn? Share in the comments!

This week’s #PPCChat on February 6 was all about B2B PPC, a topic near and dear to my heart. It was a great chat, with lots of helpful information shared.

Here are a few keys to B2B PPC that came out of the chat.

B2B isn’t the same as B2C.

It may seem obvious, but it’s a distinction that I’m not sure the search engines understand. B2B PPC is usually focused on lead generation rather than a final sale. Leads are handed off to a sales team, or put into a nurture funnel. The buying cycle is long, making it challenging to close the loop from lead to sale.

Personas are important.

In B2C, personas are often irrelevant. Your customers are whoever buys your stuff. But for B2B, personas are important to understand, as they’ll drive a lot of your strategy – especially if you’re running paid social. Defining your personas early in the planning process will help you decide how to segment your audiences and content.

Audiences are a great way to hone in on the B2B user.

A lot of PPC Chatters mentioned audiences as a way to reach their target. While keywords are important, audiences are crucial to ensuring a successful B2B campaign. Spend some time researching your audience, and thinking about the best way to reach them.

For upper funnel campaigns, content is king.

You’ve probably heard the saying about digital advertising: Don’t ask the prospect to marry you the first time you meet. In other words, don’t hammer a first-time visitor with offers to buy, buy, buy!

Nowhere is that saying truer than in B2B PPC. Users are not going to buy a six-figure piece of industrial equipment, or an enterprise software package, or whatever B2B businesses are selling, on the first go-round. Search is often taking place higher up the funnel, when people are just beginning to research solutions to their problems.

Content is king for upper-funnel B2B PPC campaigns. You must have good content to sell your audience.

B2B measurement is tough, but can be done.

Front-end measurement for B2B PPC is easy: just slap Google Analytics or another package on your site, and you can track visits, user behavior, and even website conversions. The problem is, website conversions are usually not a purchase – they’re a lead. What happens to those leads once they convert online?

That’s the loop that’s surprisingly difficult to close. B2B advertisers tend to be behind the times when it comes to tracking systems and processes. A shocking number of businesses are using old-school CRM systems, or even pencil and paper, to track leads. They have no idea what happens to them once they go to the sales team.

I encourage you to read Heather Cooan’s tweets from this week’s chat on measurement. She worked in-house at a B2B organization for several years, and has great insights into how to make this work.

In fact, I encourage you to read the entire tweet stream from Tuesday, February 6. There are a lot of great nuggets about B2B PPC there.

Here it is February, and I hope you all are full into the swing of 2018. I’m resolved to get back to regular blogging, health permitting. I’ve missed all of you.

One of my goals in 2018 is to become more proficient in Facebook Ads. We’ve acquired a couple of large Facebook advertisers over the past year, and while I’m comfortable managing the accounts, I know there are nuances that I still need to learn. And I’m guessing many of you are in the same boat.

A few months ago, the hashtag #FBAdsChat emerged on Twitter. I immediately created a column for it in Tweetdeck. While the tweet volume isn’t as high as on #PPCChat, it’s still worth following.

In addition to following #FBAdsChat, here are the top 5 Facebook Ads experts to follow on Twitter.

Susan Wenograd – @SusanEDub. Susan started the #FBAdsChat hashtag and hosts the chats that happen periodically on Thursdays at noon Eastern time. Susan has emerged as the premiere expert on Facebook Ads. She’s spoken at just about every search conference out there, sharing epic Facebook Ads knowledge. If you follow just one Facebook Ads expert, Susan is the one. She recently started her own company, too – find her online at susanwenograd.com.

Matt Mason – @MattMasonPPC. Matt is Senior Client Manager at PointIt. He’s active on the #FBAdsChat hashtag, asking great questions and sharing knowledge. He often hosts the chat when Susan isn’t available – he’s even done some spontaneous chats just because people want to. He’ll be speaking about Facebook Ads at the upcoming Hero Conf, too!

Timothy Jensen – @timothyjjensen. A longtime participant in PPC Chat, Timothy has been actively contributing to #FBAdsChat as well. He’s Campaign Manager at Clix Marketing. If you want nuggets on both PPC and Facebook Ads, give him a follow.

Akvile DeFazio – @AkvileDeFazio. Akvile has done everything, from working at Third Door Media to agency work to owning her own social advertising firm, Akvertise. Since she focuses on paid social, she shares lots of great tips on Facebook Ads on Twitter. She’s super nice too – someone great to know.

Michelle Morgan – @michellemsem. Michelle is Director of Client Services at Clix, and a frequent poster in #FBAdsChat. She’s always finding new features in the Facebook Ads UI, and isn’t shy about sharing. Michelle has been around the PPC Chat scene for a while and still posts there too.

Bonus: JD Prater – @jdprater. JD works for AdStage, a social ads management platform. He’s got his finger on the pulse of new Facebook Ads releases, and shares the info freely. AdStage has a great e-newsletter, too – go sign up at www.adstage.io.

What about you? Who are your must-follow Facebook Ads experts on Twitter? Share the love in the comments!

For the past 4 years, I’ve polled my loyal blog readers about what you want me to write about. I’ve loved hearing from you and seeing what topics are of interest. You all are the reason I keep writing, even when health issues make it challenging for me to write every week.

With that, here is the Beyond the Paid 2017 Reader Poll. Make your voice heard!

PPC ad testing is a topic that’s near and dear to my heart. It’s one of the most fun aspects of managing PPC campaigns: learning what ad copy performs best. It’s always fun to try something wild and crazy and have it perform well, or to prove an insistent client right or wrong with test data.

Lately, there have been several opinions thrown around regarding which PPC ad test settings should be used for best results. It’s been interesting to watch the debate play out in blog posts and on Twitter. And to add confusion to the mix, Google recently announced that they were reducing the options available for ad rotation to two: optimize and rotate indefinitely. Google claims the change was rolling out in September, but I’m still seeing 4 options in my campaigns.

Anyway, there are a few PPC experts who have suggested that it’s better in the long run to use the Optimize settings, rather than Rotate Evenly. PPC Hero recommends running 3 or more ads per ad group, and letting Google choose the winner. This is also Google’s recommendation, incidentally. Their argument is based on a case study showing that clicks increased when they chose the Optimize setting and ran 3 or more ads.

If you’re optimizing for clicks, you probably have bigger problems than choosing ad rotation settings.

At HeroConf London, Marty Röttgerding gave a presentation on ad rotation. I wasn’t at the conference, but his deck is up on Slideshare. I strongly recommend you check it out – while paging through Slideshare isn’t the same as hearing the presentation in person, you can get the drift. He talks about statistical significance and essentially says it’s a red herring. He also points out that the search partner network, and its low CTRs, throws things off. So does ad position and the fact that quality score and other factors are determined at the time of the auction. Marty also advocates letting Google handle ad rotation.

Now before you dismiss me as a Luddite who wants to manually control all aspects of Adwords, let me remind you that I wrote a post not long ago advocating for using bid management tools. I’m a big fan of automation. Just not when it comes to ad copy testing.

I’ve tried using optimize for conversions, more than once. We’ve inherited accounts full of campaigns with that setting. And when we’ve evaluated results, we’ve always come to the same conclusion: Optimize for conversions is flawed.

It’s flawed for the same reason that Facebook ad “rotation” is flawed. Both systems pick winners too soon. (To be clear, I’m not talking about the brand new split testing feature that FB just announced here.)

I’ve seen Adwords choose a winning ad that’s had 10-20 clicks. That’s just not enough clicks to be significant at any level. I’m not looking for 99% confidence, but when an ad could get 5-10 additional clicks and show a totally different result, that’s not a winning ad in my mind. There isn’t enough data to confidently say that the ad Google deems a “loser” won’t actually perform better with more clicks.

I’m not a fan of the “run at least 3 ads” logic either. We inherited a client nearly 2 years ago that was running 5-10 ads in every ad group. Each ad had a handful of clicks. There was no way to see which ad was winning – and no tests would ever come close to statistical significance. Here’s what happened when we took over and started running systematic tests, 2 ads at a time:

Of course, we were doing other optimization here, but ad copy testing was a huge part of it.

Here’s the bottom line. I get that automation is great and helps us focus on strategic PPC management. But why hand all your automation over to Google? We all know Google has Google’s best interest at heart, not ours.

I prefer using third party tools. For bid management, I like Acquisio. For ad copy testing, I’m a huge fan of AdAlysis. AdAlysis tells you when you have statistically significant test results, and can even automate your ad testing. It’ll pause losing ads, based on the KPIs you choose:

You can also set up draft ads that will automatically start running when loser ads are paused:

You can test a whole new ad, or have AdAlysis pick up elements of the previous ad. In the example above, I’m testing descriptions, so I want to keep the headlines the same as before. Just check the box, and the tool will do that.

It takes some time and thought to set up the automation, but the same is true of setting up tests via Google. And Google won’t automatically pause losing ads, unless you run a script telling it do to so. AdAlysis has so many other features besides ad copy testing, but is worth it for the testing tools alone.

When it comes to PPC ad test settings, I like to choose Rotate Indefinitely and make my own decisions on winners and losers.

What do you think? Are you in the automation camp for PPC ad test settings? If so, do you let Google automate, or are you using a tool? Share in the comments!

If you’re a B2C ecommerce advertiser, the answer is easy: give them a deal! Countless articles have been written about using special offers in remarketing to lure customers back to your site to make a purchase. Here are just a few offers you could try:

There are many more. It’s fairly easy to brainstorm ideas, figure out which ones make business sense, and test them with your audience.

But what about B2B lead generation advertisers?

As usual, B2B is tricky. Many advertisers are not selling a physical product, or if they are, it’s high-consideration and not going to be purchased online in an ecommerce fashion. Offers like free shipping and customer rewards don’t make sense. What sells the B2B audience, then?

Valuable information.

Offering a valuable piece of content is a common tactic for B2B – because it works. An in-depth white paper, ebook, or guide that talks about common customer problems and potential solutions is an effective way to generate leads. Gate the content behind a form, or use data connectors like LinkedIn, Facebook, or Google forms to collect contact info. High-value content is a tried and true way to get leads that ultimately turn into sales.

Free trials.

If you’re selling software or SAAS products, free trials are highly effective in converting prospects to leads. Trials let potential customers try your product risk-free for a period of time, usually 14 to 30 days. The premise is that once they get used to using your software, they won’t want to stop, so they’ll buy it. I’ve personally become a customer of more than one product this way.

Personal attention.

Nowadays, with so many things being automated, a little personal attention from a real human goes a long way. Offering a free consultation, a conversation with a specialist, or even just an appointment with sales can be an effective way to get your foot in the door. We’ve had more than one client see success with using a “contact sales” or “free consult” offer, especially for high-consideration products or complicated services that require an individualized approach.

Price quotes.

Another simple, yet effective offer is to provide a price quote. B2B products and services often do not conform to a simple one-size-fits-all price. There are nuances, service levels, and add-ons that make it impossible to even put a pricing sheet on the company website. Using a form to give a price quote is a great way to not only get a lead, but to guide the prospect into the sales funnel.

Comparison to competitors.

If you’re the market leader, or if you have a feature that your competitors lack, using a landing page with a comparison grid is very persuasive.

Whether you choose to bid on competitor keywords or not, using a comparison grid helps show how you stack up, and convince a prospect to choose you over someone else. While a grid like this isn’t an offer per se, it’s a gateway to pique a user’s interest and convince them to provide their contact info to learn more. Try it on a landing page with an offer, as an added boost.

What about you? What type of info or offers have you tried that really sell your PPC audience? Share in the comments!

Creating PPC reports is a big part of every PPC professional’s job. Whether you work in-house or at an agency, it’s almost always necessary to report on campaign performance.

When I started doing PPC in 2002, reporting usually involved downloading raw data into Excel and trying to make sense of it. Today, there are countless tools available to help create PPC reports. Some are paid, like Optmyzr, Swydo, and reporting tools within bid management platforms like Acquisio. Others are free – Google Analytics, Google Data Studio, and the reports section of Adwords, to name a few. Most reporting tools include a WYSIWYG editor that helps you easily create graphs and visualizations.

I’ve been writing about PPC reports since 2011. And yet, in 2017, I still regularly see reports like this:

If I needed to quickly answer the question “how are my campaigns doing?”, I couldn’t do that with this report.

Folks, we can do better.

A good PPC report should tell a story, It should immediately make its key points clear, with visuals. Use graphs and color coding to help tell the story:

Contrast this image to the previous one. At a glance, I can tell that we are below our target for responses, and that our CTR and budget are below target as well. From that, I can infer that we are below target on responses because we have not spent what we thought we would. As an agency, this isn’t a great thing to report to a client, but it’s immediately clear what is happening and what needs to be done about it.

Visuals like this make it easy to focus on insights and recommendations: why are we underspent? What are we going to do to fix the issue? That’s the info that clients are looking for from a report – not a dump of numbers without context.

If you’re creating reports consisting of numbers in Excel, it’s time to rethink your reporting. Even adding a simple Excel graph showing KPI performance over time can make a difference in how easy the data is to digest. Resist the urge to throw data into the report just because it exists. Every element of the report should have a purpose and should illustrate how the campaigns performed against goals and objectives. For example, is performance by device really necessary? If you’re not going to do anything different in the campaign as a result of the data, don’t include it.

And if your campaigns don’t have clearly defined goals and objectives, stop everything and read this post.

Creating good visuals in a report doesn’t require fancy BI tools. The health check in the example above is a simple Excel chart with added circles created in PowerPoint. Mountain graphs aren’t necessary either – you could use two lines and achieve the same objective.

The point is, we can do better. PPC reports shouldn’t require a math degree to decipher. Remember, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Related Posts:

Editor’s Note: Today’s guest post is by Kelsey Hadaller of Hanapin Marketing. Get ready for some excellent shopping and e-commerce tips!

If ROI goals aren’t being met in your e-commerce account, consider segmenting your Shopping campaigns for a fast way to gain control over bids, budget and improve performance. While one campaign containing all products might be effective for smaller sites, using multiple Shopping campaigns is beneficial when targeting many products.

Shopping Segmentation Case Study

Let’s look at how segmenting Shopping campaigns helped increased ROAS for an actual AdWords account. This account ran for years with several Search and Display campaigns, but only a single Shopping campaign containing all products. After consistent Non-Branded ROAS decreases, we decided to segment the All Products campaign into the below segments.

The below table shows performance for the date range before and after the Shopping campaigns were segmented. Overall conversion volume decreased by 30.93% due to seasonality during the holiday season. Despite the high volume of conversions and revenue during the holiday season, the 2:1 ROAS goal was not reached. After segmenting Shopping campaigns, ROAS increased by 33.95%.

By splitting out shopping campaigns, we did the following:

• Increased bids and spend for previous site visitors
• Decreased spend for low ROAS products
• Increased Impression Share for popular and competitive products
• Increased purchases for overstock and out of date products

Segmentation Ideas

Once you decide your Shopping campaign(s) should be segmented, the next step is determining your new campaign structure. Below are five campaign segmentation ideas that apply to most e-commerce accounts.

Brand vs. Non-Brand

Splitting Shopping campaigns into Branded and Non-Branded queries has pros and cons.

To split out Shopping campaigns into Branded and Non-Branded campaigns, add your brand name and variations of it as a negative phrase match keyword to the Non-Branded campaign. All queries containing the brand name will then be matched to products in the Branded campaign instead.

Sale Products

Another great option for a separate Shopping campaign is a campaign containing products on sale. Use the high priority campaign setting to ensure queries matching to sale products are served ads from this campaign first. If your daily budget for this campaign is depleted at 6pm, ads can then still be served from the All Products Shopping campaign for the remainder of the day.

Take your sale products campaign to the next level and implement Merchant Promotions to increase clickthrough rate!

High ROAS

Another way to maximize Impression Share for top performing products is to break them out into their own campaign. This could include popular products that convert at a high rate or high margin products that have relatively low CPCs and result in high return.

Set this campaign at a medium priority setting to ensure queries match to the sale products campaign first and the high ROAS campaign second.

Low ROAS

You might be wondering why you would include historically low performing products in your shopping campaigns. There are a couple reasons to consider giving low ROAS products a second or third chance.

First, separating products into several Shopping campaigns gives you additional control over daily spend. Lowering bids and spend on an item will likely result in improved ROAS. Second, by separating low ROAS products into their own campaign, you’re also labeling these products as high priority for optimizations. This campaign should receive more Search Query Reports and bid adjustments throughout the month than the high ROAS campaign where products convert at a higher rate.

Remarketing

Sure, you can go the easy route and increase bids for previous site visitors, shopping cart abandoners or loyal customers in your Shopping campaigns. Create a separate RLSA Shopping campaign using a high priority setting to maximize Impression Share for users most likely to make purchases.

When setting up your RLSA Shopping campaign, make sure to use higher bids than the Non-RLSA Shopping campaigns. This ensures the campaign break-out will increase Impression Share and spend for your targeted audiences.

Do you have any strong opinions on Shopping campaign segmentation? If so, feel free to comment!

Kelsey Hadaller is Senior Account Manager for Hanapin Marketing. Follow her on Twitter at @khaddy_ppc.

Yes, people were actually entering racist things like “Jew hater” as their employer or job title in Facebook. It never ceases to amaze me what people will say on social media that has their full name attached.

Facebook is working to reinstate full targeting for advertisers, but the question remains: Whose job is it to police hate speech? And, can AI and technology really understand speech well enough to carry the responsibility for editorial review?

Clearly, in this case the answer was no. Facebook is now moving to human review of the previously suspended categories.

The targeting problem created issues for countless advertisers, especially in the B2B sector. We had to shuffle priorities quickly on Monday to respond to the change. One client had just asked us to add some employer targeting to their campaigns, and we aren’t able to comply with the request. We had other clients to whom we were pitching employer-targeted campaigns, and we were scrambling to figure out what to pitch them in its place. Sure, LinkedIn is the king of employer and B2B targeting, but their high CPCs make them less attractive than Facebook. It’s a less efficient buy. And forget about employer targeting on Twitter or any other social platform.

As much a problem as the Facebook targeting snafu is for advertisers, though, it’s a greater problem for society. Targeting ads based on hate speech is a slippery slope for a mainstream platform like Facebook. They’ve already been accused of allowing foreign advertisers who allegedly hacked our election in 2016, and are working with the investigation to get to the bottom of things. No matter what side of the aisle you sit on, hacking an election is a scary proposition. Facebook had to act.

Notice that no one has gone after Google in all this (at least not yet). Nor have they gone after Twitter – despite the fact that Twitter is a haven for political and racist trolls. It just goes to show how far Facebook has come in the ad world. They’re near the top of the heap – maybe not financially, but in terms of attention.

I remember when Google was the center of attention. Seems the model has shifted. Will Facebook unseat Google any time soon? Maybe. The writing is on the wall.

What do you think about the whole Facebook targeting snafu? Did it impact you? Has Facebook become the darling of the online ad world? Share in the comments!

I’ve been writing a lot about PPC audiences this year. PPC audiences have been the talk of marketers for a couple of years now, and with good reason. We used to have keywords, and paid social – and the two didn’t cross paths. Now, we have RLSA, remarketing, in-market audiences for search, and loads of other great ways to combine the intent of keyword search with the targeting of paid social. Here are 5 great articles from around the web on PPC audiences.

Why I like it: “Now, before we get into the throes of keyword philosophy, I’d like to reduce the number of angry comments this post receives by acknowledging a crucial point.” It’s vintage Kirk, and still tees up the premise of the article.

Why I like it: The post lays out the details on how to use in-market segments for search – and then points out that, while this is a cool feature, it shifts the power from advertisers to Google. Right on.